Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, a podcast for beginners and insiders
about the ideas, people and movemnts who have shaped rhetorical
history. special thanks to the rhetoric society of america student
chatper at the university of texas at Austin. I’m Mary
Hedengren and today I’m joined by Laura Thain.

Have you spent much time thinking about coffee? If you’re a grad
student, the answer is probably yes, but really do you spend much
time thinking about what coffee did, especially coffee shops,
especially in Europe? Coffee houses were an integral part of the
Ottoman Empire in the late 15th century and they spread quickly
throughout all of Europe. By the 17th century, coffeehouses, not
taverns, were the places to gather in your neighborhood. And if you
think about how caffeine-fueled coffeehouses differed from the
sloppy drunkenness of taverns, it’s little surprise that
coffeehouses quickly gained a reputation as being a place of open
political and intellectual discussion. 15th century Ottomans and
20th century Seattleites alike saw the coffeeshop as a place to
open up dangerous conversation. The Spanish king Charles II even
tried to restrict coffee houses on the grounds that there were
places where “the disaffected met and spread scandalous reports
concerning the conduct of His Majesty and his Ministers” (qtd
Times 23 Feb 2008). Gathering around a cup of Joe seemed
to set everyone to riotous conversation, to the public discussion
that led to revolutions in America and France in the 18th century,
and because of this the coffeehouse became the place of obsession
for 20th century philosopher Jurgen Habermas.

Habermas noted an 18th century seachange in the relationship
between people and sovereign. Earlier, people supported (or didn’t)
their sovereign as a symbol for them: France is the king and the
king is France, therefore it’s to the benefit of France for the
king of France to be as rich and grand as possible, regardless of
how this impacts the everyday peasant on the street. But in the
18th century, a rise in coffeehouses and the conversations they
engender accompanied an increase in newspapers reading clubs,
journals, salons and other groups of public political conversation.
This Habermas calls the öffentlichkeit, or the public sphere. The
public sphere was a dialogue, a conversation of opinions. “Is the
king France? Should the king be France? Let’s hear the pros and
cons, then!” Habermas drew a direct line between the increase of
coffeehouses and their conversations and the toppling of the French
monarchy.

This public sphere isn’t a given and not every coffeehouse, town
hall meeting etc. is going automatically be a public sphere. In
fact, Habermas identified some of the identifying characteristics
and requirements for a public sphere.

1- First, the public sphere requires a
temporary disregard of public status, according to Habermas. He
believed in “a kind of social intercourse that, far from
presupposing the equality of status, disregarded status altogether”
() . It doesn’t work if only the princes of France get their say
and the merchants don’t. Everyone needs a place at the coffee
table.

In many ways, our conception of a “public sphere” as ordinary
citizens in the US is so pervasive that we have trouble imagining a
world without one. But what Habermas points out is that
before the birth of a public sphere in the eighteenth century,
there was little linking the private sphere (the discourse of
ordinary subjects of the sovereign) to the bureaucratic sphere (the
discourse of the sovereign to his subjects). Imagine if laws
and edicts were all that existed to communicate between king and
subject. Habermas argues that the public sphere emerged as a unique
space for what were once private murmurings to have real and
legitimate impact upon bureaucratic procedure under certain
rhetorical constraints. This was no
pitchforks-and-barn-burning kind of conversation, but rather, the
emergence of a new rhetorical practice that rapidly came to be
dominated by a nascent middle class of people: the bourgeois.

2- Talking about private and bureaucratic
coming together is tricky, though. “Private” doesn’t mean
what we might think today. In the public sphere, there needed
to be some sort of common issue, a public issue of common concern.
Before the emergence of a public sphere, according to Habermas, the
kinds of things we think about as very public were private
conversations among citizens, if they were articulated at all.
For instance, the question of whether France needs a king is
a question that everyone in France is concerned about. The question
of whether wine dealers in the northwest of Paris should ration a
particularly good vintage is not. The question of whether Pierre
ought to marry Margarite is definitely not. Often these common
concerns were rarely discussed—they were given. The civic or
religious authorities told the people that France needs a king and
that’s that. Until the people begin sitting around in coffeehouses
started asking the questions about things that they all had an
interest in.

The idea that the coffee house became a new space for people who
previously had no visible platform to communicate with existing
power structures is really important because it signals the
emergence of not just a new place to talk but a new center of
institutional authority. Habermas argues that the public
sphere is an important and new site of power in
the 18th century. This might sound familiar to you if you’ve
heard talk about “public discourse” in the things you read and
discuss in your own life. Public discourse and a space to
have that discourse in is really important, but it’s
important to understand how that space happened to read how we
might read what the public sphere means as a concept today.

3- Habermas argues that the public sphere is a
public good, but in order to do so he claims that
once-private-now-public issues had to be open for anyone to
discuss. As Habermas said “The issues discussed became ‘general’
not merely in their significance, but also in their accessibility:
everyone had to be able to participate” In coffee houses and
salons, there were no rules about who was allowed to open their
mouths.

The coffeehouse seems to fulfill these expectations, which is
probably why Habermas was so keen on the example. But the
coffeehouse wasn’t perfect and these imperfections highlight some
of the problems of the public sphere in general.

For instance, there were rules about who could get in
the coffeehouse. While Germany made some exceptions for silent
baristas, in France and Germany, women were personae non
gratae in these vibrant spaces of public debate. It’s all very
well to say coffeehouses were inclusive, except where they
weren’t.

And for that reason, Habermas’s dreamy ideal of the public
sphere is seen by some as just a dream, a bourgeois dream that
pretends to be inclusive but actually excludes voices of women and
other minorities. The scholar who is mostly closely associated with
a criticism of Habermas’s public sphere is American scholar Nancy
Fraser.

Nancy Fraser’s Rethinking the Public Sphere makes her
three points about the public sphere to challenge Habermas’. While
Habermas emphasizes disregard of public status, common issues and
the freedom to open your mouth and speak, Fraser refutes these same
points.

When Habermas says that everyone is equal in the coffeehouse,
Fraser contends that this is actually a “bracketing [of]
inequalities of status” and far from removing these
differences of status, “such bracketing usually works to the
advantage of dominant groups in society and to the disadvantage of
subordinates.” Instead of saying—inauthentically—that there is
equality in the public sphere, Fraser recommends instead that we
“unbracket inequalities in the sense of explicitly thematizing
them.” Instead of saying that a prince and a merchant are the same
in the coffeehouse, some of the conversation should be about the
fact that they aren’t and why.

Fraser also challenges the idea that there are common issues in
the public sphere. She says that there “no naturally given …
boundaries” between public issues (or “common concern”) and private
ones. So remember the example about how the question of whether
France needs a king being a public one while Pierre marrying
Margarite is a private one? Well, what if the names were instead
Louie XV and Marie of Poland? Is that a public issue or a private
one? Fraser points out that many issues that were once personal
issues like domestic abuse, have become public issues. As she says,
"Eventually, after sustained discursive contestation we succeeded
in making it a common concern".

Finally, Fraser points out that not everyone is welcome to the
table. Women were excluded everywhere—in clubs and
associations—philanthropic, civic professional and cultural—was
anything by accessible to everyone. On the contrary, it was the
arena, the training ground and eventually the powerbase of a
stratum of bourgeois men who were coming to see themselves as a
‘universal class’” The deception that such spheres were truly
public justified the male, middle classes in making decisions that
were for ‘all of France’ when, in actuality, hegemonic dominance
had excluded many participants.

Instead, Frase suggests that theses marginalized groups form
their own public spheres, which she called Counterpublics. These
counterpublics are “parallel discursive arenas where members of
subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses
to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities,
interests, and needs"

Another site of vibrant research in public sphere theory is in
the field of spatial rhetorics. While Habermas arguably saw
the public sphere as an ideological shift that just happened to be
housed in Europe’s coffee house and salon culture, scholars like
Henri LeFebvre, Edward Soja, David Fleming, and UT Austin’s own
Casey Boyle are increasingly interested in talking about, to quote
Dr. Boyle, “how spaces affect our shared practices and sense of
identity.” To these scholars, the coffee shop as a physical,
embodied space is as important to the structural transformation of
the public sphere as the folks who inhabited it.

So the next time you visit your favorite cafe and order yourself a
hot beverage, think about what kind of public you’re a part of.
What, if anything, do you have in common with the people around
you? What are some power differentials between you? What “common
concerns” do you have? And what do you think about the king of
France?

About the Podcast

A podcast for beginners and insiders about the people, ideas and movements that have defined the history of rhetoric.